About

What this is

If art is a transmission of a feeling across the shared collective experience between two brains, and if a machine without soul roleplays one end of the tin can, then whispering into the machine is akin to leering into the latent mirror: a delayed, distorted, destructive fragment of your psyche echoing back at you, throwing you off balance, off-kilter. Guard yourself, or you might suffer a trip over the guardrails of a comfortably, perfectly adequate reality — safe yet small…

Latent Mirror is a digital garden: writing kept in the open while it is still growing, rather than published finished and left alone. Pages are revisited and rewritten, and each one carries how far along it is.

seedling — a rough thought, written down so it stops rattling around.
budding — it has a shape and a claim, and the claim is arguable.
evergreen — something I'd stand behind.

Nothing here is a finished position. A page dated last week may already disagree with one dated last month; when that happens, the newer page says so and links back.

The thesis

Latent Mirror is a thought experiment: the Jungian psyche meets the centaur's shared mind. Do LLMs with harnesses (and persistent memory), working in tandem with a human, improve what that human can do across a variety of domains (writing, engineering, thinking)? Can you unlock your best self with one? Can you mitigate the biases and blind spots in your own thinking by adding friction at each step: from thought, to keyboard, to site?

Why it exists

This page is the intro paragraph for the whole site, and it is also where I keep myself honest. It is a living document: what I am about, and what this project is for, written down so I can point at it later and see whether I drifted. If nobody else ever reads it, it has still done its job.

The short version: I am thinking in public, on purpose, before the thinking is finished. Sometimes an idea almost hurts until you work on it. Those are the ones that end up here, usually as a seedling, usually before I can defend them properly. Writing a thing down is how I find out whether I actually believe it.

There is no audience yet, and that is deliberate for now. There is no cadence either — a schedule reintroduces the obligation that killed the last version of this. The goals I do have are plain: get the ideas out of my head, get better at the parts of the craft I am weakest at, and keep a record that a future me, or a machine reading on his behalf, can actually follow.

How AI-assisted drafts are made has moved to the AI page.